Story

Everyone likes to throw around the word community. But to many, it means "I get what I want." We've seen some pretty appalling behavior on Soylent the past couple of days, and the drama has been unbearably painful to watch - embarrassing, really.

This DDoS is childish behaviour who has probably decided he is going to "punish" someone for the transfer of power.

The big take-away is that it is hard for a "community" to organize itself fast enough to do just about anything interesting at all. It takes leadership and dictatorial spirit to force people into organized behavior. Read the Dictator's Handbook if you don't believe it.

These things work better when some budding entrepreneur with a vision quietly builds his/her own thing, and then a community forms around it because they like and see value in it. Like this place, for example. I haven't heard any masturbatory "we're a community, goddammit" blather around here. Face it: A rowdy crowd of violent, pitchfork-wielding nerds is no way to start a business.

Final lesson: this stuff is, after all, a business. In the world of the WWW, someone has to host and manage the code, pay the server costs and the costs of the people who manage software and hardware, and pay bandwidth fees as well. If you want free, then chug down a reality pill and recognize that with the exception of a few vanity sites, the WWW needs to make money to pay for itself. Free means going back to the federated, ownerless model of Usenet, which remains an awesome place to meet and discuss tech with other nerds. And you can't DDoS Usenet, you can't whine about the new interface. You can only choose a Usenet client that suits you and suck up the plain-text goodness. No ads, no Flash, no bling, no images, even. It's Usenet: the worst you can do if you want to behave badly is crapflood, spam, and bitch about other people's posts.

Go get yourself an account on Solani.org Usenet provider and hook your newsreader up to start participating on comp.misc if you don't believe me.

Meanwhile, Pipedot seems to be relatively drama-free. How refreshing.